The polite thing to do after interviewing a high-powered CEO is to wrap the executive in a certain amount of praise. If you're a contemporary, backbone-infused journalist, you lather up that praise and then counter it with a helping of critical insinuations. The trick comes from being firm and aggressive but not too insulting. …

COMMENTS

Nothing new under the sun?

I see these kind of articles are increasing occouring. There's element of FUD involved in them Fear Uncertainty Doubt. All that stuff about Windows & Viridian. You know Dianne is right these MS guys just DON'T GET IT. It aint about the platform (ESX, Xen, Veridian). The platform war is over. ESX won. All the MS guys are going to do is play a very slow catch-up. 180 days after Win2008 - really kicks MS offering into the very long grass... Where virtualization is going is into the management, availability and performance space - its called Storage VMotion, Continious HA and real VDI solution rather than cobbled together VDI that's on offer

I'm no market expert but if VMware is over-valued or over-hyped then surely this is the problem with stock-market - not VMware's problem. After all they have no control over the share price. If the stock market cannot correctly value company after the dot-com bubble then surely that's the markets fault. But dismissing VMware Virtualization is mere hype really missing the point. A smacks of kind of "nothing new under sun" view of the world. Sure virtualization isn't "new". Its a mature technology that's been around in Unix for donkey's years. In fact Dianne and Co worked on projects at Berkeley (Disco/SimOS). I'm sure they know that what they doing is not especially earth shattering. We not saving lives here guys. But it is new and radical - to the WinTel space. The paradigm of Intel+HW Vendor+Microsoft is (finally) being decoupled. That's great news for customers and shareholders alike. Sure, VMware could do a Novell - become arrogant, and assume they have right to print money. So in away we do need Xen & MS to offer competition and focus in the virtualization space.

Lastly - comparing Dianne to Bill Gates and Steve Bullmar. That's really funny. You know Dianne comes across not as some money grabbing "Gordon Geeko" type. But some one who realise her boat on the water is more likely to lead to happiness than paracuting in Africa with your billions and having a warm, happy and vacuious philophroic feeling afterwards... She sounds like a proper Californian!

apples and pears

Funny how the wallstreeters compare VMware with Microsoft in dollars, to show that VMware will grow faster....when Microsoft started growing a dollar was worth more than twice what it is now. It's just like horseracing and touts, isn't it?

Those who don't read history are fated to relive it

Sometimes I get really depressed with the state of computing today. There seem to be no ideas that are genuinely new. IBM introduced the first commercial VM based system back in 1972 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM/CMS) and here we are towards the end of the first decade of the new millenium and the ideas are being hyped as the current big thing. Not critisicising VMware as such, they seem to have pretty good products that are well accepted, but certainly not a new idea.

Those who do read and understand their computer history will realise that virtualisation has its place but is by no means everything. In the end processes need to co-operate and multiple VMs on one system are still competing for resources so eventually the line between multiprocessing Operating Systems and multiple Virtual Machines blurs.

It is the way things have been, are, and will be

Looking back over the life-cycle of systems over the last 30 years or so, it seems to come and go in waves.

Once there were servers, and only servers, seen as the smallest computer you could get was the size of a room and weighed about the same as the combined weight of the contestants on "America's biggest loser".

Then computers got smaller, and everyone wanted one on their desk. They still weighed as much as a mini and had the functionality of a tin of peas but it was still a step up.

After that came a period where servers made a comeback. Bigger, more powerful (and more expensive) machines allowed for centralised data storage. Then some bright-spark realised that the same "tin of peas" (so called because the contents are green in colour) functionality could be achieved by connecting "dumb terminals" to a central server running the software. It worked out cheaper and easier to support than a PC on every desk.

Along comes Windows (and other OS with GUI) and its pretty interface, and the servers can no longer cope with spewing it out to many machines. The full desktop is reborn with pretty colours and endless hours wasted spending Solitaire.

Over time, technology caught up again. Now with servers that can handle dozens of sessions, all providing full Windows functionality, the cost to companies (and the environment) starts to make sense again. For now, at least, virtualisation is worthwhile.......

And so it continues, and we await the next leap in desktop technology or software that renders it unsuitable for virtualisation.....and so on....and so on....

VMware works for me

I am a very happy VMware Workstation customer. I don't even remember why I bought it. It doesn't matter, I find new uses for it every day. I can try out that new Linux distribution without messing with hardware. I can run apps requiring RHEL 4 on my computer. I can emulate a server and its clients. I can connect the network port on a virtual machine to a physical ethernet card and test new hardware without setting up a separate network. I could go on and on. All this and no bugs! 100% of the software cost on my Linux machine went to VMware. This is a company with a bright future.

I'm running the free Linux version of VMware Server

on this Debian box. I've got a Windows 98SE guest session running reliably and stably in the window behind this one running my Eudora mail client. I've got Ubuntu running in a second guest session. I can run applications on the same filespace from three different OSs. (at the same time if I'm careful) It would be interesting to run OSX as well, but the fact that it isn't available is Apple's fault, not theirs. But it would be nice to be able to run applications without particular regard to what OS it runs on if Apple ever decides to join the real world.

The VMware stuff works on the desktop. My experiment with virtualbox was less successful, and since Xen doesn't support guest/host clipboard, it's useless for a desktop, so I haven't tried it. I wouldn't be surprised if they can execute the more radical ideas described in the article.

It looks like the company made a bad deal with respect to acquisition, but that happens, and sooner or later, that company is going to become a lot less profitable with a board run by EMC suits that presumably really doesn't understand what they're making or marketing. That's necessarily their problem, and a warning for technology entrepreneurs.

But I'm happy in the meantime, and will wait with interest to see what they'll do next.